The Official Intelius Blog

The Official Intelius Blog

There’s a new threat landscape and it’s you! So, what does that mean? According to the latest reports
from data breach experts (namely the Verizon
Business Data Breach Investigations Report), attackers are no longer
spending as much time directly attacking servers and data. One of the most
common methods of access today is for attackers to target employees and their
systems to gain a foothold into the network.

This means that you are more important than ever to the confidentiality,
integrity, and availability of the systems that you and your company
rely on each day. What can you do? Here are some things to keep in mind as the
new front-line defenders of information security:

E-mail is not secure by default. If you need to
exchange confidential information, ask the other party if they have a
secure or encrypted e-mail mechanism. E-Mail is typically transmitted
across the Internet in plain-text, which makes it vulnerable to eaves-dropping
by many parties along the way. If you need to send confidential or private
information at work and the other party does not have a secure mail
gateway, speak with your Helpdesk about possible alternatives. There may
already be an enterprise-wide solution in place that you can use. For
sending confidential and private information at home you may have to
investigate an encrypted e-mail provider, or consider simply calling the
party you need to share information with. With some apps in the various marketplaces
today you can easily encrypt both your voice calls and text messages.

Any pond with fish will eventually be Phished. The days of e-mails
that contain viruses or malicious links from unknowns are far from behind
us. Several of the largest data breaches this year have happened because
of an infected e-mail sent to a handful of employees. However prescient
(and frightening) these attacks account for only a small number of data
breaches today. The same principal is still being applied in ever-more versatile
ways, however. Attackers have started moving their phishing scams,
malicious links, viruses, and spam to social networks to keep up with the
times. Be wary of strange (especially “viral”) links that show up on
Facebook or Twitter, as these are the latest ponds to be phished. These
links can lead to viruses or infected pages which can, in turn, infect
your machine and even grant attackers access into your company’s networks.

Smart Phone viruses are a growing trend. Mobile phones now only
carry the moniker of “phone” for the sake of tradition. They are just as
much (if not more) a computer as the desktops that we used a decade ago.
No matter what your phone of choice (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, et
cetera), there are most likely attackers trying to write malicious code
for it or (on some platforms) sneak malicious apps into the app
marketplace. It is probably worth researching some Anti-Virus and firewall
solutions for your mobile device platform of choice. This is another among
many good reasons to consider e-mail insecure. The infancy of smart
phone operating systems makes it easier for attackers and harder for
anti-virus and anti-malware makers, which makes your mobile device an easy
point of entry for an attacker looking to gain access to confidential
company data, or your own private information.

In his talk, Jim revamped the section on regulation, attempting to deconstruct
privacy framing into spaces, players, and consequences. In his words, "the space defines
whether we’re engaged in a public, private, or shared experience with players
of varying power disparity where consequences can be assessed."

On Wednesday, Jim participated in a panel at pii2011 Venture Forum on Social
Sharing and the Data-Driven Economy. The panel was hosted by AllThingsD’s Kara
Swisher. Jim was joined by David Glazer, director of engineering for Google+; Roger
McNamee of Elevation Partners; and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (video).

Stay tuned for Jim’s talk at the Strata
Conference in March on how we might better think about data-use, its benefits
and consequences. Thanks for your insights, Jim!

It’s a beloved tradition. Each year, Intelius employees embrace the holidays by
collecting cash and food donations for local charities. During the two weeks
leading up to Thanksgiving, employees in teams of 15 compete to collect the
most cash and food for charity. Each team chooses a leader and creative team
name like “Hunger-Busters” or “Can-tributors”.

As we
near the conclusion of the 2011 food drive, our combined efforts are evident. To
date, employees have filled over 200 crates of food items and donated over
$5,000. Moreover, the amount given will be doubled by Intelius via its match
campaign.

We urge corporations and individuals to give back in whichever capacity they
are able, whether by funding a program, hosting a food drive, or volunteering at a
food bank.

The key
takeaway from the talk (see summary slide) is that the privacy pro is becoming a key evangelist
for responsible innovation within fast-moving, high technology organizations.
To be successful, four lessons:

Innovation
is a team sport. Communication is key. So talk
and (more importantly) listen to your toughest critics, both inside and outside
your organization. They’ll better understand your perspective and you’ll
often get great ideas.

Build
a confluence of influence. Good
decisions come from every corner of the business, early in the product
cycle. Find the members of any team that are inventive, collaborative, and
capable of creating the Reality
Distortion Field (used so effectively by Steve Jobs) that’s so vital to
disruptive innovation.

Be
the happy warrior. Innovation,
by definition, changes the status quo and makes some people uncomfortable.
Engage with them in a constructive, respectful way inline with Graham’s
Hierarchy of Disagreement.

Find
clarity in the confusion. Use math,
data, and history to find the clarity within the confusion. Privacy issues
are especially difficult. As Jeff Jarvis points out in his new book, Public
Parts, even defining privacy is a journey through an Escher
maze. Jeff has a great, well referenced chapter on What Is
Privacy? that illustrates the perennial struggle we all have
navigating the privacy maze.

The good news is that the privacy labyrinth can be traversed with
sufficient situational assessment, data analysis, and historical
perspective. Then, to remix metaphors, you can be that excited child in
the room of manure who finds that elusive pony.

Earlier this month, Intelius' Chief Privacy Officer & General Manager of Data Systems spoke at the Wolfram Data Summit
on what we in the data privacy community might learn from a century’s
history of food policy. Here’s his abstract and presentation:

Data is the new medium of social communication and is forcing a
healthy debate to define public/private boundaries, fair access, and
appropriate use. Like food, social communication (and the data that
drives it) is a necessity for humanity’s survival. This talk will
discuss the key ingredients to avoid the empty calories.

Several
of Intelius’ nonprofit partners are featured in Evening Magazine’s “The Best of
Western Washington.” The nonprofits are competing among 267 others to win the
honor of BEST
favorite local charity! Intelius has seen first-hand what these
organizations have done for our community, and we wish them all the best of
luck.

Here’s a bit about each organization:

Hopelink
Since 1971, Hopelink has served homeless and low income families, children,
seniors and people with disabilities. Hopelink's mission is to promote
self-sufficiency for all members of our community.Vote
here

The
Sophia Way
The Sophia Way assists single homeless women in East King County, Washington on
their journey toward independence. They provide shelter, permanent housing, and
supportive services. Currently, they are the only staffed overnight shelter for
single adult women on Seattle’s Eastside. Vote
here

Treehouse
for Kids
Treehouse programs offer kids in foster care what all children so desperately
need: a safe place to dream. Their six core programs – Tutoring, Educational
Advocacy, College and Career Planning, Little Wishes, Summer Camp and the
"Wearhouse" – give foster children a real childhood as well as hope
for the future. Vote
here

YWCA
The YWCA's mission is to advance the quality of life for women of all ages,
races and faiths, and their families. In support of this mission, the YWCA
provides services to meet critical needs, promote self-sufficiency, reduce
violence, eliminate racism and achieve equal opportunities for all people. Vote
here

Youth
Care
Founded in 1974, YouthCare was the first shelter for homeless youth in the
Western United States and continues to be a leader in providing services to
this vulnerable population. YouthCare offers services ranging from street
outreach and residential housing to education and employment training. Intelius
sponsors their “YouthTech” program, which teaches kids about Cisco IT Essentials
and gives them hands-on classroom technology training.Vote
here

Boys
& Girls Clubs of Bellevue
Boys & Girls Clubs of Bellevue was founded in 1952 with one Clubhouse in
downtown Bellevue. Since its inception, the Club has provided the young
people of our community with a safe environment where adults respect and listen
to them; a place where they can have fun. Today Boys & Girls Clubs of
Bellevue operates 14 sites within the City of Bellevue. Intelius sponsors their
“teen center.”Vote
here

Cast
your vote today to help out these fantastic partners. Winners will be announced
here
on October 24th.

There’s no denying that it’s difficult economic climate out
there. Here at Intelius, we are binding together more than ever to give back to
our community. It’s a sad reality that nonprofits are facing decreased support
in a time of increased need.

In June, Intelius CEO Naveen Jain announced the
names of two Intelius Scholars he chose to attend Singularity University's (SU)
Graduate Program on full scholarship. The scholarship recipients, Sharron
McPherson and Emily Kuria are among only 80 highly credentialed students accepted
to SU’s highly competitive Graduate Studies Program.

Specifically, Sharron McPherson was chosen due to her exceptional leadership
track record and commitment to solving women's issues through Government Policy
and Financing. Emily was selected for her pioneering spirit in breaking gender
stereotypes in Science and Math and innovative efforts to improving public
health in Kenya.

On Friday, August
26, SU held its closing ceremony at the Mountain View Computer Museum.
This ceremony gave student teams from the Graduate Studies Program the
opportunity to display their projects. Here’s an update from Sharon and Emily
on the incredible things they’ve accomplished during the rigorous 10 weeks.

Sharon McPherson:
“The first is a concentrated solar power solution for the developed world. On
Energy Team 2, we focused on Africa and the idea was to create a dispatchable,
affordable renewable energy solution for the 1.8 million people that don't have
access to electricity. Once that project was underway, I wanted to explore
energy solutions for the DEVELOPED world with a project called Play Energy. Play
Energy is an energy efficiency company that aims to help consumers measure and
control energy consumption by utilizing next generation energy consoles that
include a real time, augmented reality game that links decreased consumption to
gaming points.”

Emily Kuria:“Our team is interested in developing 21st century skills in tween (4-12) and
teen (13+) girls by leveraging emerging technologies to expose them
to diverse opportunities and positive experiences that facilitate growth
and participation. We not only want to educate girls on the skills
necessary to survive and succeed in this new world, but we also want to create positive
role models in social media that will inspire them. Presently,
we have an established partnership with GIGAPIX Studios that have won
more than 7 Emmys, and we pitched Google last week.
YouTube Google are looking to redefine the way we watch TV, and
are moving towards creating long-form content for viewers online. ”

Intelius
congratulates Sharon and Emily for their accomplishments! Read about why they were chosen here.

Andrew Borthwick, Ph.D. is Principal Scientist and Director of Data Research with Intelius. Recently, Borthwick presented at the "9th International Workshop on Quality in
Databases", a workshop which was held in conjunction with the "Very
Large Databases (VLDB) 2011" conference in Seattle.

ABSTRACTRecord
Linkage (RL) is the task of identifying two or more records referring to the
same entity (e.g., a person, a company, etc.). RL systems have traditionally
handled all input record types in the same way. In an industrial setting,
however, business imperatives (such as privacy constraints, government
regulation, etc.) often force RL systems to operate with extremely high levels
of false positive/negative error rates. For instance, false positive errors can
be life threatening when identifying medical records, while false negative
errors on criminal records can lead to serious legal issues. In this paper we
introduce RL models based on "Cost Sensitive Alternating Decision
Trees" (ADTree), an algorithm that uniquely combines boosting and decision
trees algorithms to create shorter and easier-to-interpret linking rules. These
models present a two-fold advantage when compared to traditional RL approaches.
First, they can be naturally trained to operate at industrial precision/recall
operating points. Second, the shorter output rules are so clear that it can
effectively explain its decisions to non-technical users via score aggregation
or visualization. Experiments show that the proposed models significantly
outperformed other baselines on the desired industrial operating points, and
the improved understanding of the model's decisions led to faster debugging and
feature development cycles. We then describe how we deployed the model to a
commercial RL system with several billion personal records covering nearly the
entire U.S. population as input, and obtained a 6:1 ratio of input records to
output profiles, with an estimated 99.6%/86.2% precision/recall trade-off. This
system was then deployed in a commercial e-commerce website, as well as to the
sub-domain of linking criminal records, obtaining an impressive 99.7%/82.9%
precision/recall overall trade-off.

There’s been a lot of recent debate around the use of online names sparked by the
Google+ real names policy. The stark absolutism of this
debate baffles me, as if we had to choose between them. It’s a false choice. We
should have them all. As we map human social customs online, nuance and context
rule. Inflexible policies and binary choices are a cop-out. Life’s complicated
and more interesting that way. As I recently tweeted in a privchat:

There are legit use-cases for pseudonyms so they shouldn’t be banned. But
they are certainly unnatural for mainstream use. #privchat

This got me thinking about how many real names are typical for each person?
I did a quick look across the Intelius public-records corpus of a few hundred
million people and counted the number of real names per person. The results are
what you might expect:

The vast majority of people, 83%, have one full-name [Just to be clear, Sarah
Jessica Parker may also go by Sarah Jessica Broderick. Those would count as
two real names.] A significant minority, 11%, have two names. I imagine that
most of the people with two names are married women who are recently married or
simultaneously maintain their maiden and married names (typical of professional
women). It’s a little surprising that 6% have more than two names. I wonder how
many people in this set have criminal records?

So far, the nymwars debate has largely been framed around the 17%
that have more than one name. But there are strong pro and con arguments for
nyms, pseudonyms, and anonyms. What, the totality of human social engagement
can’t be pigeonholed into a single use-case? Hmm, Surprising.

Nyms

Whether offline or online, the vast majority of us build trusted
relationships and reputation around our real name. Real names are easy and
natural. I use my real name on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. One of Facebook’s best strategic moves was encouraging
use of real names. Generally, real names encourage real interactions and
weakens the barrier between offline and online experiences. However, requiring
real names is an 83% solution that’s fueling a Google+ backlash from the
other 17%.

Pseudonyms

There’s a host of reasons for pseudonyms, many of which have been cataloged during the recent nymwars. An example of a
pseudonym is Twitter’s PogoWasRight,
which is used persistently and has established respect within the privacy
community. Pseudonyms are not new as Samuel Clemens
proved more than 130 years ago.

The challenge with pseudonyms is that they are tough to manage. I know
several professional women that simultaneously maintain two legal names. They
are in a perpetual state of multiple account management—”which name did I use
for this account again?” I founded a startup several years ago that tried to crack this problem.
It’s a bear.

Anonyms

As for anonyms, they are distinct from pseudonyms. The intent with
pseudonyms is to build a long-lived identity that’s separate from our real
identity. In stark contrast are anonyms (e.g., fymiqcxw)
which are throw-away identities that in nearly all cases (except political
dissent) have nefarious intent. Online anonyms too often encourage what
psychologists call deindividuation. Nothing empowers a psychopath more than an
audience and a mask.

The key takeaway is—whether nym, pseudonym, or anonym—trust, accountability,
empathy, and civility are built around knowing whom you’re dealing with. As we
move through this continuum, we move away from “real” relationships. If that’s
your intent, fine. The nymwars debate is larger than the real name policies of
any social network. It is a further evolutionary move toward mapping our social
norms online. Sure, it’s messy. Most human endeavors are.